Skull-Face: A Novelette of Dark Intrigue

"I do you a great honor, Mr. Costigan; among a very few, even of my own servants, you may say that you saw my face and lived. I think you will be more useful to me living than dead."

While trying to silence the demons he carried with him from the battlefields of World War One, Stephen Costigan becomes hopelessly addicted to hashish. As he wastes away in a Limehouse drug den, a beautiful woman of mystery draws him into the schemes of a being who may be older than history itself.

But Stephen Costigan is no one's pawn, and he soon allies himself with the British Intelligence Service to defeat the menace that is Skull-Face and regain his independence... or die trying.

Skull-Face is a classic adventure tale from Robert E. Howard, the creator of such legendary pulp fiction heroes as Conan, Solomon Kane, and King Kull. Originally serialized in 1929 in the pages of Weird Tales magazine, it's Howard's take on the "Yellow Peril" genre--an adventure fiction subgenre that gave rise to Sax Rhomer's immortal Fu Manchu--as well as his spin on the "truth' behind H.P. Lovecraft's legendary Elder Gods. It's a tale worth reading for lovers of adventure yarns, classic pulp fiction, and those interested in the greater body of literature that evolved from H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories.

Interesting Trivia: The "Stephen Costigan" character in Skull-Face is distinctly different from the "Steve Costigan" character featured in a score of humorous short stories (also available from NUELOW in Fists of Foolishness and Shanghaied Mitts). Both characters first saw print in 1929, with "Steve Costigan" debuting in the July issue of Fight Stories, and "Stephen Costigan" first showing up in the October issue of Weird Tales.

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.

File Information

Watermarked PDF

Adobe DRM-protected PDF

These eBooks are protected by Adobe's Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. To use them, you must activate your Adobe Reader software. Click here for more details.

Watermarked PDF

These eBooks are digitally watermarked to signify that you are the owner. A small message is added to the bottom of each page of the document containing your name and the order number of your eBook purchase.

Warning: If any books bearing your information are found being distributed illegally, then your account will be suspended and legal action may be taken against you.